


Torn Up Memories

by stranger_thanfiction



Series: Stranger Things 30 Day Challenge [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, I am absolutely writing this to deal with the letter, Minor Relationships, Sad Ending, Season 3 Spoilers, Stranger Things Season 3, hopper deals with the emotions of life, hopper-centric, it's mostly an analysis of the character ngl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 11:36:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19852357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stranger_thanfiction/pseuds/stranger_thanfiction
Summary: "Feelings.Feelings.Jesus. The truth is, for so long I'd forgotten what those even were. I've been stuck in one place. In a cave, you might say. A deep, dark cave. And then I left some Eggos out in the woods and you came into my life."An analysis on the man, the myth, the hero, Jim Hopper. Season Three Spoilers





	Torn Up Memories

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back again, this time with the most emotional scene as per Day 3 of @hey-dingus 's 30 Day Challenge.  
> (The title comes from Angels by Khalid. Beautiful song, but do not recommend listening to it after finishing season 3.) 
> 
> Hopper's death was rough on me, but the letter absolutely killed me. There was nothing I could add to such a fitting end, nothing more I could provide, but I really wanted to add more background into his feelings and how he grew to be the character we all love. 
> 
> As always, kudos and comment if you enjoyed getting your heart ripped out. If not, you can always yell at me on my tumblr @modernfeminismtalking

_There's something I've been wanting to talk to you both about. I know this is a difficult conversation, but I care about you both very much. And I know that you care about each other very much, and that's why it's important that we set these boundaries moving forward so we can build an environment where we all feel comfortable, trusted, and open to sharing our feelings._

Jim has never been the most open man, but damn it, he's going to try. 

First, it was ‘Nam, and damn it, it’s been twenty years but he still has nightmares over what he saw. He was young and stupid, thinking it’d be something worthwhile, something that would make him a hero.

Instead of accolades, Vietnam gave Jim a chain-smoking habit and shell shock.

He didn’t return to Hawkins when he came home. He couldn’t. Couldn’t face his father, couldn’t face Joyce knowing one wrong firework and he’d be down on the ground clutching his ears like he was back in the jungles. 

Instead, Jim picks a hole in New York City to carve out an existence for himself.

He’s kind of a mess when he meets Diane. 

He’s working at a dive bar, saving up so he can get an apartment closer to the police academy. He’s got bags under his eyes from the barrage of nightmares, and he looks as though he crawls out of bed before leaving for work. When she walks in, blonde hair tossed up into a neat updo and a crooked grin on her face, he almost drops the liquor in an attempt to say “hi.”

It’s not love at first sight, but she’s one hell of a looker.

Somehow, she cleans him up, or he cleans up for her (the memory is kind of fuzzy).

Diane doesn’t deal with nonsense; Jim’s entire life up to this point has been nonsense, but she doesn’t need to know that.

So, he picks himself up by his bootstraps, gets into the academy, and comes out an NYPD officer. After his first month, Diane comes out with a large rock on her finger. 

The wedding is small but intimate. They get married in a small little chapel upstate, her entire family in attendance and none of Jim’s, and he can’t help but thank whoever is up there for his second chance.

It’s not perfect: he still has nightmares, and smokes (albeit considerably less), but it’s as close to perfection as it could be, in Jim’s opinion. 

Two months after the wedding, he comes home to find Diane holding a receipt for a doctor’s visit and an overjoyed smile on her face. 

Pushing down the rush of dread that ices his veins at the sight, he reaches for Diane and spins her, ignoring the fear in favor of excitement _because he’s going to be a Dad!_

Six months later, Sara is born and he’s never loved anything more than he loves her. He refuses to put her down over the next three days, repeatedly counting her fingers and toes. Jim is amazed that something so wonderful came from someone so damaged. 

Sara grows to become happy and healthy; she enjoys hearing stories from Jim before he tucks her in every night. She’s got bright blue eyes and Diane’s soft blonde hair, and one smile can make Jim bend to her every whim. 

The small family moves out of the city, to a small town upstate that reminds him of Hawkins if he jerks his head too quickly, and it makes the hour commute to work each morning worth it to see Sara this joyful. 

On one rare occasion the three of them were able to play together, Jim and Diane quickly realized something was very wrong with Sara’s health. 

Weeks of doctor’s visits flew by, and the couple end up sitting down by a man in a white coat unaffectedly telling them that their daughter has cancer. 

The next few months blurred together.

He remembers fights with Diane over money and care and the inevitability that neither of them wanted to consider.

He remembers Sara’s sobbing over the first time her hair fell out.

He remembers story-time in a too white room. 

He remembers holding his seven year old’s too still body long after she had breathed last. 

Jim doesn’t remember the funeral. 

A month after her absence, Jim comes home from the station to an empty home and divorce papers sitting on the kitchen table. 

Once again, Jim falls apart. 

He calls off work, he grieves his daughter, his wife, his perfect life that had been torn away by something so out of his control that he couldn’t fight it if he tried.

After the fifth day of existing in an intoxicated stupor, he decides he needs to go somewhere new. 

It takes a while to sell the house and get his things in order. 

He sends Diane half the money for the house and uses the other to move himself back to Indiana.

He wishes he could say Hawkins has changed, but the sleepy Indiana town hasn’t a bit. It’s as if the town was trapped in a time capsule. The only change is that his classmates are now the parents of the kids riding around on their bikes, carefree and loud. 

He’s hit with nostalgia for a simpler life every time he drives through downtown, but that’s quickly drowned out with booze and pills. 

He’s made the Chief of Police of this boring little town; maybe he’d be exhilarated in another life, but he just quietly thanks the mayor before heading back to his small, empty house.

The job is easy. Nothing ever happens in Hawkins. No mischievous teens trying to steal from stores, no domestic calls, it’s this perfect little town filled with perfect little people. 

(If Jim was paying more attention, he’d know that the life of one Joyce Byers was the opposite of perfect, but he had neither the sobriety nor emotional maturity to handle that.)

For three years, he wakes up, washes a pill down with whiskey, heads to work, drinks the coffee Flo makes him, does the crossword for eight hours, goes to the house of a new pretty face every week for some entertainment, and trudges back to the empty house for more pills and whiskey to keep the nightmares at bay. 

He’s handling this clusterfuck called life, very well, thank you very much, until one Will Byers goes missing.

Kids go missing every day, but seeing Joyce, Joyce Byers, his never was, there in the flesh ready to knock him out if he doesn’t have an update on her son is the impetus to wake up. 

He can’t look at the posters of the kid, or he’ll see Sara at first glance. 

This ends up being bigger than he could have ever expected it to be. This kid’s disappearance unearths a whole government conspiracy and child experimentation and more missing kids, and Jim can’t help but think that there’s no amount of alcohol that can cure the headache this causes.

After weeks of looking, they find the kid’s body.

It’s ID’ed as the kid, hell, they even have a funeral, but Joyce is convinced he’s still out there.

Jim understands her grief, probably better than she understands it herself. Even though she’s screaming at him about lights and faceless attackers and burnt phones, he gets it.

Jim doesn’t believe her, but he’ll help her get closure. 

He ends up in a fucking government labratory, standing in front of this giant crack in the wall that can’t just be a crack in the wall, because there’s slime and shit flying through the air and an eerie glow coming from this thing, and he starts thinking that maybe Joyce isn’t so crazy after all. 

Then he gets knocked out by the goons, and wakes up with his house bugged, so he can’t try and deny this is happening. 

Jim finds Joyce’s other son and Karen Wheeler’s oldest with a car full of weapons; he’s really wanting a drink now. 

At the pair’s request, he finds the Byers kid’s friends at an abandoned junkyard in a bus. The black haired one, Karen’s he’s assuming, stands defiantly and defensively in front of a small girl with a shaved head in what looks like play clothes. 

He chokes down the amazement of how much she looks like Sara as he tries to listen to the three boys speak over one another to tell him the story. 

He takes the kids to Joyce’s house, where they tell him this little girl is going to be able to find the Byers kid. Jim is skeptical, but Joyce is so ready to believe that they all head to the middle school to try and figure it out. 

The girl, Eleven, finds Will, but they have no idea how to get to him until Jim remembers the crack in the wall. He takes Joyce to the lab and it’s going to work, they’re going to get the kid, until it doesn’t. 

The asshole doctor revels in their capture, and plans to kill him with a staged overdose unless Jim gives up where the girl is. 

While having no value for his own life, Jim wants the kid out alive, so he directs them to the middle school and trusts that she can keep them all safe. 

He and Joyce journey into the Bizarro world of the Upside Down, and eventually find the kid.

Will’s not breathing, and after the quick fear of another funeral, this time a real one, the pair work on jumpstarting the kid’s heart. 

They get him out, they get him to the hospital, and Jim is filled with relief. The kids pile into the room to see Will, he notices the girl missing and his heart drops into his stomach.

Maybe he shouldn’t have put all that faith in such a young girl.

He’s picked up by those same goons that knocked him out earlier, what feels like a lifetime ago, and forced into secrecy over this event that’s now scarred Hawkins, even though no one knows it.

The way they seemed urgent to get rid of him makes him think that they never found her, so he ends up leaving waffles in a box out in the woods every night for about two months before she shows herself. 

She’s dirty, tired and scared. Jim thinks she’s going to run again until she doesn’t. Her hair is a little longer, her face is thinner, and he can’t help but see his daughter every time he looks at her, so he takes her back to the cabin. 

The cabin is a shithole, but it’s secluded and safe enough that the pair build a little home there quickly. She grows stronger, her hair grows longer, and he stops seeing her as a shadow of Sara but of his new second chance, his daughter El.

It’s awkward for a while, but he grows to trust and love her and she to him. 

Despite this, all she wants to do is to go outside. 

Jim has three rules to keep her safe, and leaving violates all of them. 

He wants her to be able to come and go. He wants her to see her friends and to live as normal as a life as he can give her, but he also knows that the government is still looking for her, so in the cabin she stays. 

Jim will go and visit her friends so she can get some kind of updates. He checks in with the Wheeler kid and goes to Will’s check ups with Joyce, and for once, feels comfortable with his new normal. 

Jim should really stop doing that.

Once again, things start going south in Hawkins. This time, it’s rotting pumpkins and weird private investigators and the lab functioning again, and he can’t help but fear for her safety.

After a lesson on compromising and a late night, El explodes on him. 

El is impatient and doesn’t understand, and he leaves the next morning on bad terms after she smashes the windows in the cabin. 

Will is the center of the problems in the town. He acts like he’s possessed, but the Wheeler kid is stuck to his side like glue and helps the adults figure out what’s going on. 

Jim keeps digging and ends up in these tunnels underground that lead back to the lab. After being stuck for days, Bob and Joyce rescue him, and the kid is beginning to unravel.

Whatever is in those tunnels is in that kid, and he soon is taken over by that thing. He barely gets a chance to radio El, to apologize for being gone so long, before going back to the lab with Owens, Bob, and Joyce. 

It’s a trap, because it’s always a goddamn trap, and Newby dies in their escape attempt. Joyce nearly collapses in on herself before she remembers the kids and they race back to the Byers house.

The kids are all there, even the older Byers and Wheeler kids and that weirdass Harrington with the hair, and unfortunately, the thing in Will finds its way there, too. 

Just like last time, Joyce’s house is where it all goes down, and Jim is sure they’re going to get eaten by the “demodogs.”

Then they don’t. Instead, one comes flying through the front door.

A part of him wants to kill her for leaving and compromising her safety; the other half is thankful she showed up, but both are quickly negated by Wheeler trying to punch out his balls for hiding her. 

Jim takes him away, lets him punch, kick, and cry it out because they need all the kids alert, and he can’t risk one of them dying because they’re being angsty.

He doesn’t want to take her back there, he doesn’t want to put her in harm’s way, but he knows that El is their best option for survival. 

They all split up, and Jim takes her back where it all began.

He can’t help but be in awe at her power, at her pure strength, and a small piece of him wishes he could do this for her, to spare her the pain. 

She closes it, but almost dies in the process. 

Hop thinks that saving the world entitles her to one night out, free of any consequence.

He gets her birth certificate from Owens, and some advice on how to integrate her, before promptly ignoring it and telling her she can go to the dance.

El’s still recovering, even a month later, but her face lights up when he tells her. 

Jim wants her to smile a lot more. 

However, he has no idea how to get her ready, so El goes over to the Byers once Jonathan takes Will to the school. 

She’s amazed at everything Joyce does, and Hop wishes that this wasn’t her first night as a normal teenager.

An hour later, dressed up in one of Nancy Wheeler’s old dresses and her hair curled around her ears, they head to the school so she can have her one night with Mike. 

He watches her go in before he ends up smoking with Joyce outside like they used to, and something blooms in his chest. 

Six months pass. Everything’s becoming calm once again. Summer comes and with it, El gains some increased freedom to go spend time with her friends. She’s beginning to talk more and share things more effectively, and her smile shines brighter than he’s ever seen it. 

As Hawkins calms down, Jim’s blood pressure sadly has not. 

Jim can say with confidence that he is not a fan of one Michael Wheeler. 

He would hate anyone dating his daughter, but it doesn’t help that Wheeler is a disrespectful little shit that undermines his authority at every turn.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if she wasn’t pulling away. 

He gets that she’s growing up, he gets that she’s doing healthy, normal teenager things, but she’s moving too quickly and he doesn’t want her to.

Jim goes to Joyce for help, because this parenting teenagers thing is new and she seems to know what she’s doing, and she gives him advice about feelings and sharing.

His daughter just recently started speaking in full sentences, but sure, he can try talking about this stuff.

The talk gets derailed by that smug little shit Wheeler, and he ends up threatening the punk into avoiding his daughter. 

The next morning, when Wheeler lies and El ends up alone in her room for the first time in six months, he can’t help but celebrate.

He extends the celebration to Joyce by inviting her to dinner, and even after breaking up a protest against the Mayor, he feels like nothing could make him feel better.

Hop really needs to stop thinking things are going to turn out okay.

Joyce stands him up at Enzo’s, and he numbs that pain with wine. 

He nearly has a conniption when he sees El’s door closed, but to his relief it’s only her and that fiery redhead. 

He gets wasted that night and wakes up to Joyce screaming about magnets and insisting they go back to Hawkins Lab. 

He’s just angry and hungover and jealous enough to go along with her crazy plan. They head to the lab and find nothing as he expected, until a large Russian man decides to kick the shit out of him. 

Somehow, he returns to the cabin where he wakes to find Joyce having taken care of him. Jim, recognizing the man from Kline’s office, hauls them back to the mayor’s office and has to kick the shit out of him before he gives up the info. 

In turn, they get a list of properties the Mall--the fucking Starcourt Mall, of all things--has purchased, and end up getting the shit kicked out of them once again by the Russian Terminator.

Jim has a black eye and probably a minor concussion, but they have a hostage.

A hostage who, of course, doesn’t know any fucking English.

His car blows up, he steals some douchebag’s car, and he’s about to kill Joyce if she brings up the goddamn magnets one more time by the time they reach Bauman’s hideout. Murray flips shit at having a Russian in his home, but the fucker--Alexei--just wants to watch Looney Tunes and drink cherry slurpees. 

Alexei eventually reveals the true nature of the mall, that it’s disguising the Russian lab attempting to open the gate once again, and that he knows how to shut it down. 

Feeling his pulse quicken, Jim calls Owens to try and send help.

Never a break in the fucking action.

He’s under the assumption that the kids are fine at this point, Karen saying they’re all having fun at the fair, until Joyce points out that it’s about 10 minutes from the mall. 

They race back to Hawkins to try and find the kids. The four reach the fair and find Karen, who of course has no clue where the kids are. Jim and Joyce get sidetracked and chased once again by Russian Terminator and Alexei dies. 

He’s really sick of burying nice people. 

They’re heading in the car, going to fuck-knows-where, when they hear the kids are being targeted by the Russians in Starcourt Mall. 

Jim walks in to see his daughter forcing a tentacle slug out of her leg, blood running down her nose and screams on her lips, and can only think to step on it before he runs to her.

El’s exhausted, they all are, but he can only hug his daughter as they form a plan to destroy the gate once and for all. She insists she can fight, but they both know she needs to be safe. 

Jim hugs his daughter tightly, wishing he could hold her forever, before passing her to Wheeler.

Despite everything that’s happened, he’s still afraid of Jim, but he promises to keep her safe. 

Just like before, he and Joyce go down into the Russian lair with Murray to end this. The plan is executed somewhat flawlessly, with even a date planned at Enzo’s on Friday, and they reach the gate with little interference.

Enter Terminator. 

Jim fights his hardest. He wins, barely, and ends up throwing the man into the laser. This backfires on him, causing the signature on the laser to grow larger and creates a barrier that he cannot get through. 

Jim looks up at Joyce. 

Joyce, who’s lost so much already.

Joyce, who’s been his companion through all this shit.

Joyce, who he has a date with at 7 on Friday at Enzo’s, and he gives her the go ahead to close the gate.

They say your life will flash before you in your final moments. Jim wishes that were true; all he can think of is his daughter.

El, who’s already lost so much. 

El, who’s going to lose yet another parent.

El, who never got to hear his stupid letter. 

Jim recalls it as the gate is closed and flames engulf the room, losing consciousness as he feels a pull backwards. 

_ When life hurts you, because it will, remember the hurt. The hurt is good. It means you're out of that cave. But, please, if you don't mind, for the sake of your poor old dad, keep the door open three inches. _

  
  



End file.
